Sony smartphones won’t get Jelly Bean until next year

We may see Key Lime Pie before Sony gets even a taste of Jelly Bean.

Many of Sony's Xperia smartphones will not be receiving their upgrades to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean until early 2013, the company announced on Friday. Another handful of handsets released as recently as 2011 won't be getting the upgrade at all, including the Xperia Arc, Xperia Play, and Xperia Neo; the US version of the Xperia Ion released this past summer and upcoming Xperia TL are yet to be guaranteed upgrades.

Sony has stated that the Xperias T, TX, and V will be updated to Jelly Bean in "mid-Q1" of 2013, which will be about six months after Jelly Bean was officially unveiled at Google I/O alongside the Nexus 7. Most major Android phones have already received their Jelly Bean updates, though few manufacturers can claim to have been timely, and at least one has backed out of promises for upgrades. Rest in peace, Android Update Alliance.

Sony has clarified that the Xperia Play, the sliding smartphone with a PlayStation-style gamepad, will not get an update to Jelly Bean at all, despite having been released in June 2011. The US version of the Xperia Ion, released in June 2012, is absent from the list of phones due for upgrades, but we can't imagine Sony will abandon it so soon, especially since the international version will be upgraded. In the meantime, we are expecting too see the next version of Android, 4.2 Key Lime Pie, unveiled at a Google event on October 29.

Sony is one of the newest players in the Android smartphone game, having recently bought out its partnership with Ericsson and releasing its first independent smartphone only this summer. But the company doesn't have that much margin for error, either, when companies like Samsung are dominating as they are.

Admittedly, smartphone software upgrades are not the easiest thing to promise to customers, given the convoluted path they have to travel past carriers. We didn't expect Sony to lead the pack, but it can't languish this far behind and hold onto its credibility, either.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston